The New Pictures

The Time Machine (George Pal; MGM) deserves a place on the very short list of good science fiction films partly because its hokum is entrancing, its special effects expertly rigged and its monsters sufficiently monstrous. But the picture's major virtue is that its human characters are compounded not of green cheese or ground-up Dracula scripts, as is customary in such ventures, but of flesh, blood and imagination.

The yarn, skillfully embroidered by Producer-Director George Pal and Scriptwriter David Duncan, brings up to date H. G. Wells's 1895 romance. Disheartened by the alarms of his time--Boer War news is bad--an idealistic London inventor, agreeably acted by Rod Taylor, constructs a machine able to move about in time (it bears a plaque reading "Manufactured by H. George Wells"). He invites some incredulous friends to hear his adventures at a dinner five days hence, then eases the throttle forward in search of peace and good will.

Time accelerates abruptly. An apple tree visible from his laboratory window blossoms and bears fruit in an instant, and as the years click by on the time machine's temporal speedometer, a female store dummy in a window across the street does a perpetual striptease. In 1917 the Time Traveler stops, only to learn that the world is at war. He sets out again, but matters get worse. He sees the blitzed London of 1940, then is almost buried during the atomic blowup of 1966.

He emerges in A.D. 802,701 to discover a world populated by a passive and benumbed race called the Eloi--blond youths and maidens who retain little of 20th century cultures except the art of permanent waving and a grim phrase that means peace: "All clear." To his horror, the Time Traveler learns of the Morlocks, a tribe of cavern-dwelling green mutants who breed the Eloi as beef cattle. (Why science fiction's monsters never breed cattle as cattle is perplexing, but perhaps they dislike the taste.) Actor Taylor, of course, does mighty battle to save the Eloi, particularly a charming little cutlet named Weena (Yvette Mimieux), then chugs off to 1900 in time for dinner. Later that night he heads back to 802,701 taking with him three books to re-educate the Eloi. The film ends with an appropriately Wellsian riddle: Which three books?

Jungle Cat (Buena Vista) is another of Walt Disney's magnificently photographed and sometimes irritatingly edited True-Life Adventures, a series designed to show that the works of nature are almost as manifold as those of the California animator. This time the area filmed by Disney's camera-equipped naturalists (James R. Simon, Lloyd Beebe and the late Hugh Wilmar) is the Amazon rain forest, a jungle so nearly impenetrable that only its major rivers have been named. The region's thousands of species of plants grow in a steaming tangle, in some places 200 ft. high, and only the animals able to reach the upper levels of this network are safe from the most beautiful and deadly of the jungle's killers, the jaguar.

The cameramen occupy themselves for the most part with the fascinating doings of a jaguar family, and one of their most remarkable invasions of privacy occurs near the film's beginning. A sleek, beautifully spotted 200-lb. female snarls menacingly at an evil-looking black male who prowls through her hunting ground. They clash in what begins, apparently, as a murderous fight. Then the slashing softens to pawing and a fond chewing of necks. One hundred days later, the female gives birth to two kittens, one black, one spotted.

The education of the kittens includes a comical first swimming lesson and a violent illustration of how to annoy a cayman (South American crocodilian). As the kits watch, the mother creeps up, whacks the tail of an enormous cayman, then darts back as it lunges for her. The game continues until the male jaguar takes over, feints past the cayman's jaws, gets a death grip and drowns the reptile. The jaguars lose no battles, although their prey sometimes escapes. Working singly or as a team, they kill a snorting peccary (wild pig) and a huge boa constrictor, and frighten a tapir out of its scant wits.

The film's narration is neither as dreary as some travelogues nor as good as it could be, but at least it is not coy about the rain forest's frequent deaths. And unlike some of Disney's early wildlife films, it lets the animals provide their own humor. The script might have been improved by more scientific detail; adults would have suffered, but youngsters, accustomed to getting missile data on the backs of cereal boxes, would have thrived on it. A more serious flaw is the film's musical score. It is not as objectionably cute as that of Water Birds, in which whooping cranes mated to Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, but it is bad enough. Presumably it is supposed to hype up interest, but jaguars are too accomplished at scene stealing to need help from massed violins.

Ocean's 11 (Dorchester; Warner) is a dandy illustration of the kind of acute thinking that keeps movie nonsense miles ahead of TV nonsense. When the Pharaohs of the small screen plan another shoot-'em-up, they give the tough-guy hero a routine tough-word last name, such as Gunn or Staccato. Hollywood's mentalists, on the other hand, resorted to nothing so crude in naming the hard case played by Frank Sinatra. They called him Danny Ocean. This not only permits a title too baffling to leave the mind easily; it offers a straight line for any number of jokes (Sinatra an ocean? He ain't even a Scotch and water, etc.).

Danny's eleven consists of himself and ten other ruffians, all former members of a commando-like World War II unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. The old soldiers are played by such members of Sinatra's off-screen Clan as Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr., and a jollier lot has not tripped the screen since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Their idea of a veterans' meeting is not to salute the flag and then sit down to play pinochle; they decide, with the help of an imaginative racketeer (Akim Tamiroff), to rob five Las Vegas casinos at the same time--to wit, when everyone in town is singing Auld Lang Syne on New Year's Eve.

It is all funny enough when things finally begin to move. But before things do, Sinatra and his chums spend more time than is really necessary punching each other kiddingly, talking tough to dolls, practicing judo chops on waiters and in general playing themselves. The action, when it comes, is fast and foolish enough to make this one of the more entertaining films of a not-too-entertaining summer. The ending is clever, and what precedes it has a little of everything, including a little wit. There are square jokes for squares (Red Skelton, playing himself, is unable to cash a check) and Clan jokes for Clan fans (Sinatra, disguised in blackface, asks Sammy Davis Jr.: "How do you get this stuff off?"). And for students of the ridiculous, there is a memorable doctor's-office line. Says ailing Richard Conte to a solemn-faced physician: "You can give it to me straight, doc. Is it big casino?"

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